Results of the Quick Poll

Well it looks like the Zombie war is over.
The final word seems to be the Quick Poll

Despite the biased methodology there was no support at all for Richard Chappell's position. Frankly, I almost felt sympathetic enough to go on and support it myself.

At first Richard C implies that they were refraining from answering because they were trying to be polite to Richard Brown...

so if anyone's actually been following all the arguments, I hope they will offer their informed judgments (and not just refrain out of some misguided sense of politeness, say).

Finally (after rejecting anyone who agreed with Richard Brown as uninformed) he gives up on that and takes the position

we were interested in the conditional question how others would respond if they were to carefully read all those exchanges. Since nobody bothered to do so (understandably enough), we're simply left with our own judgments.*

It is fairly hard to indisputably win an argument on the internet. People can always find some convoluted reason why the evidence is corrupted.
When did you last see a political debate on dailykos or a warblog end with "damn, looks like I was wrong about Iraq"?. Once the incorrect side "has their back up" the best you can hope for is probably to leave everyone watching to be able to say, "that guys argument didn't make me any more likely at all to believe any of his positions." That leaves it ambiguous as to whether the issue is the person's argument that is weak or whether they are arguing well and their position is wrong.

Both of which leave the "defeated" side with something to work on.

* It is good that he finally realized there was no "third party" to whom he could pretend he was aiming his arguments